MacBook 3G prototype owner gets parts back, Apple kept 3G stuff

Back in August, a geek that wanted MacBook parts and machines for repairing purchased some stuff to work with. One of the things that he purchased happened to be a prototype MacBook with a 3G antenna and SIM card slot. He did what any geek would do and tried to sell it on eBay with the auction hitting $70,000 before Apple killed his hopes of a massive payday and took the machine back.

The guy has apparently been trying to get the parts back from Apple for a while now and according to AppleInsider, the parts finally made their way back home. Naturally the 3G antenna and SIM card slot were missing from the parts. The guy only got back a battery, HDD, and two sticks of RAM he put into the notebook to fix it. I wondered when this story first broke exactly how someone came to have the machine.

The person that sold the notebook originally is reportedly an Apple Engineer that was given the notebook for doing some software development work. I don’t see Apple giving someone a prototype like this for doing dev stuff. The guy that bought the machine and tried to sell it on eBay is considering a suit against the Craigslist seller. The eBay owner that had to give the machine back is Carl Frega and Frega says he has about $400 in legal fees and other costs invested.